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The New Evernote Google Chrome Extension

Today, Evernote’s Google Chrome Extension gets a major upgrade in functionality, usability and general awesomeness. We’ve received tons of great user feedback on what the ideal web clipping experience should be, and, with this update, the Evernote Chrome Extension takes a big step in that direction.

Article Clips

Imagine how great it would be if the clipper could identify exactly what you wanted to clip without you having to highlight anything. Now it can. Introducing, Article Clips: that easiest way to save blog post and articles. Whenever you arrive at an interesting blog post, simply click on the Evernote extension. The extension will instantly select the body of the post. Then, click on the green Clip Article button and you’re done.

The extension will only go into Article Clip mode if you don’t select anything. If you would prefer to grab a specific part of the post, then select that portion and click the extension, as you normally would.

Clicking on the arrow next to the Article Clip button lets you choose to clip the entire page or just the URL.

New look and feel

We redesigned the interface to focus on the things that are most relevant when clipping: titles, tags and notebooks. As always, you can add text to your clips by clicking into the new auto-expanding text box.

Browse through your notes
The tabs that ran along the bottom of the popup have been replaced with much more stylish buttons. These let you either search through your entire account, or view all the notes that you have clipped from the domain that you’re visiting.

Simultaneous Search, now on Bing and Yahoo!

Simultaneous Search lets you search the web and your Evernote account at the same time. All you do is type your Google, Bing or Yahoo search as you normally would and that same search will be performed in your Evernote account. The web search results appear as usual, with the addition of a line displaying the number of matching notes from Evernote. The same number is also displayed in a badge over the Evernote Extension icon. Clicking on the extension shows a list of all your notes that matched the search.

You’ll be amazed at how often you perform searches for items that you already have saved in Evernote. Enable this feature either when signing into the extension or in the extension preferences.

Improved notifications

Most the time, clipping is nearly instantaneous. If a page is particularly rich, then it might take some time. Luckily, the clipper does its thing in the background so you can keep browsing. Once it’s done, a notification popup will appear to confirm that the page has been sent to your account. The popup lets you go directly to the note if you’d like to view it, edit it or share it. You can hide these notifications in the extension preferences.

Privacy and Chrome permissions

The Evernote Chrome Extension requires access to some of your browsing data in order to perform its various functions. Rest assured that we never share this data or use it for anything other than its intended purpose. A number of users have asked us to explain why the Evernote extension needs certain permissions. Please take a look at our Knowledge Base article for an explanation.

First on Chrome

Google Chrome allows us to develop functionality that is often significantly more difficult to replicate in other browsers. We do hope to extend these capability to other platforms. Enjoy the new features and let us know what you think.

Chrome Extensions update automatically. You may need to restart your browser to get the latest.

Thanks for turning me onto readability with this comment as I was not familiar and it’s pretty cool.
The clipper does work great with it though – as you can just wait for the readability conversion and then use the clipper.
You then get the clip as it appears in readability.

I agree – Readability is an absolute must for many of the sites today. Most have given up using the blinking text but they still have found many ways to mess up a clip with everything from flash to JS.

Thank you! This looks awesome. No joke, my browser of choice is in large part determined by how Evernote works in there. For a long time, Firefox was just better but I’d noticed recently that Chrome was feeling a lot more solid. Keep up the great work.

Me too, the comparatively bad clipper was one of the only reasons I never fully switched from firefox 3 to chrome. Now that firefox 4 is out I would have gone back anyway, but I wouldn’t mind a couple of these features to be integrated there (optionally) as well! Still, very very happy with both evernote and the current firefox integration, and it just keeps getting better!

Same for me: I switched from Chrome to Safari because of the Browser Extension (the Safari extension clips to Evernote offline which the Chrome extension clips to the Web). I love the speed of offline clipping in Safari, but I also very much like the new “Article clipping”. Any chance you could build this into the Safari extension too, or make the Chrome Extension clip to Evernote locally?

Wow! Evernote in Google Chrome, it couldn’t get any better than this. I have always loved Chrome but i’m loving it ever better. With Evernotes’ Article Clip, it has made life a lot easier for me. Much Thanks! (^_^)

1) Go to your extensions at this page: chrome://extensions/
2) Click the “Developer Mode” link on the right hand side.
3) A set of buttons will appear at the top of the page. Click the “Update extensions now” button.
4) Wait a bit; on my computer the updating only took about 10 seconds.
5) Evernote should now be updated. Scroll down the extensions page and check the version if you like

1) Go to your extensions at this page: chrome://extensions/
2) Click the “Developer Mode” link on the right hand side.
3) Click the “Update extensions now” button.
4) That’s it! Evernote (as well as you other extensions) should now updated

“Omlette5 hours agoMark as spam
If you’re having trouble updating to the new version, first read what they say above. If that doesn’t work, try this:
1) Go to your extensions at this page: chrome://extensions/
2) Click the “Developer Mode” link on the right hand side.
3) A set of buttons will appear at the top of the page. Click the “Update extensions now” button.
4) Wait a bit; on my computer the updating only took about 10 seconds.
5) Profit! Evernote should now be updated. Scroll down the extensions page and check the version if you like.”

“First on Chrome
Google Chrome allows us to develop functionality that is often significantly more difficult to replicate in other browsers. We do hope to extend these capability to other platforms. Enjoy the new features and let us know what you think.”

I never use the extension because you can’t change tabs while waiting to the content of the popup to download (doing so nukes the popup). So if it’s slow to update you’re stuck in the tab waiting for it…

That’s why I stick to using the bookmarklet, fewer features but it’s remains on the page if I tab away from it and is still there when I come back.

I installed it, put in my login/pw, got it to successfully clip and sync one note (the notifier popped up and the desktop client showed the new note as expected), but from then on it wouldn’t work any further. When I click the extension, it briefly says “syncronizing”, then leaves me with an empty grey bubble. Nothing appears in the desktop client.

I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled multiple times, but it has yet to succeed again.

I do have “allow local data to be set” enabled, and even put [*.]evernote.com in the exceptions under ‘allow’.

This is version 11.0.696.68 for OSX, if that helps, which as far as I can tell is the latest stable version for OSX.

Clicking on the extension is half of the clipping process. So, you can browse your notes in the extension popup, the click out of the extension and you won’t have clipped anything to your Evernote account.

Is this working for Macs? None of the articles I have clipped using this extension are being saved to Evernote. It goes through the motions and lets me select notebooks, tags, write comments and everything else, and when I click “clip article” it looks like it is working correctly and there aren’t any error messages or anything like that, but the clipping never show up in my Evernote. The simultaneous search seems to be working, but just not the clipper. What’s going on?

For starters, Chrome is a lame browser compared to Firefox. Examples: No print preview; no vertical tab placement; weak implementation of Do Not Track.

And the Evernote clipper on Chrome is lame compared to the FF implementation. I installed the new version and got this message:

“Your browser’s preferences conflict with the Evernote extension. Try restoring Chrome’s Privacy Content settings to the defaults: Allow local data to be set and do NOT block third-party cookies. Consider disabling other 3rd party extensions.”

No such problem on Firefox. I like Evernote, and it’s too bad they are hamstrung by Chrome limitations. EVERYONE with common sense blocks third party cookies. If you want Evernote to be able to set a cookie, do the engineering to provide users with a control to do just that specifically. When it works on Chrome as well as it works on Firefox, then give us all that hoopla and hype, but not until then.

The new clipper for Chrome is a lot faster and more stable but the new UI is horrible, the buttons is too small, the colors to bland -not exactly easy to see which notebook is the current and the selector between full page/article/clip url doesnt remember last selected choice so it keeps going back to “clip article”.
Please either fix the UI or tell me how to downgrade to a useful version….
Its much better technically but I just cant get along with the UI, guess I have to switch back to FireFox.
Dont get me wrong I like Evernote(premium user) but a lot of a products value comes from the usability.

Totally agree Dan. I was using the clipper for a few days before I realised that I was only getting sections of the pages I wanted. ClipArticle functioanlity is great but there should be a way to set a user preference to say which clip type is the default. Also, if the clip select drop down was moved to before the button it would be easier ans you could arrow dowen to change to ClipPage then tab through and hit enter on the clip button. At the moment it’s awkward as you have to tab through, hit the down arrow and then tab backwards to the clip button. Not very user friendly at the moment but the update is great so hopefully it’ll be tweaked soon!

Suggestion in next update. Add to button, “Note” so I can add text notes quick without having to Open Evernote in another tab and have it load. Sometimes I want to jot down an idea and it would be great to have this option.

I noticed that in your example, the user has a notebook entitled Recipes. I think it would be great if down the road this “article” concept was taken even further:

Using the existing mark-up of the page, most recipes could be extracted as an Ingredients List and the method. The ingredients could then go in as check-boxes. (Then make it functional as a shopping list, modify the recipe and repost to a community site, etc.)

There are other ways to leverage the use of clipping to format differently for the type of clip:
product pages-notices for when something goes on sale, or extract formating for a spreadsheet
Event pages-remind you of availability of tickets and for how long a movie, an exhibition, or the circus is in town for…

Same for me too and I can’t see how to disable it. Chrome is set to only show one url as the home page on launch but every time it launches, the silly clipper url gets launched too. (cache is cleared of course, I don’t have any history enabled in chrome)

The extension is a very good step forward as it makes evernote more usable. However, I agree with @Phillip Wilson, @cher, @will and @donniezazen that the provision to add, append and edit notes should be added in the next version. I’m sure there are a lot of people using evernote to create notes. and it would be useful to them.